Russia undergoes painful recovery

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): In a coronary bypass operation, like the one that Russian President Boris Yeltsin must undergo at the end of this month, the odds of survival are 97 or 98 percent. The odds that the peace pact recently signed by Gen. Alexander Lebed in Chechnya will hold are 75 percent or better. And the odds on a stable, democratic, prosperous Russia in the 21st century are better than even.

Despite the fact that 37 million of Russia's 146 million people don't earn enough to support their families. Despite a death toll from organized crime last year that exceeded total Russian military losses in Afghanistan. Despite a 28 percent fall in living standards since 1990, and a 50 percent fall in industrial output.

It doesn't matter. The United States experienced similar falls in production, comparable social calamities, and even an equivalent growth of organized crime during the Depression and Prohibition years of the 1930s, and its democracy survived. What counts is the politics, and Russia is getting that right.

"They have found something wrong with my heart," Yeltsin told Russian television viewers on Sept. 5 (to the vast surprise of practically nobody). But the good news was that the particular thing wrong with Yeltsin's heart, narrowed arteries, is relatively easily corrected by bypass surgery.

It is a major surgery -- up to five hours on the table while blood from the heart and lungs is diverted to a bypass machine -- but the procedure is well proven, and Yeltsin will almost certainly be freed from the "colossal fatigue" that forced him to go into virtual seclusion after the first round of the spring elections.

In half of the beneficiaries of this kind of surgery there are new problems with narrowed arteries within 10 years, but Yeltsin is prevented by the constitution from running for the presidency again in the year 2000 anyway. In the meantime, after a convalescence of two to three months, he will be back on the scene, as vigorous and mischievous as ever.

This is not unadulterated good news for Russia, of course, but on balance it is preferable. Indecisive and erratic as he is, Boris Yeltsin is nevertheless a legitimate focus of authority, and at the moment Russia needs that much more than it needs a heroic leader.

He will be around for at least a couple of years more, and he will be much more like the Boris Yeltsin of 1990-1991 than the pathetic, almost invisible figure of recent months. This may not solve a single one of Russia's problems, but at least it will preclude another presidential election soon, and block far more sinister characters from imposing their "solutions" instead.

Then there is Alexander Lebed, the former general who came third in the first round of Russia's presidential election and then joined Yeltsin's camp, bringing with him the votes needed to guarantee victory over the communists. "I am the man who can stop the war in Chechnya," he said last September -- and he has.

To be fair to the Chechens, they won their independence war by their own efforts. For lightly armed guerrilla troops to take back and hold their capital in the teeth of everything the imperial power could throw at them, as the Chechens have done in Grozny in the past month, is virtually unprecedented in military history. Even against troops as demoralized and badly trained as those of the Russian Interior Ministry, it was a stunning achievement.

But the Russians, though beaten, had the resources to go on fighting for months or even years, further inflating a casualty toll that Lebed recently estimated at 90,000 dead. It is his achievement that Russia bit the bullet and signed a cease-fire that effectively grants Chechnya independence, even if the final negotiations on that topic are postponed for five years.

Can he make the deal stick, against the opposition of rivals within Yeltsin's camp and of ultra-nationalist and Communist opponents outside it? If anybody can, he can, for he has already proven his own nationalist bona fides in defending the rights of the Russian minority in the ex-Soviet republic of Moldova. And he hasn't hurt his own chances of succeeding Yeltsin, either.

Does Chechnya's de facto independence herald the dismemberment of the Russian Federation at the hands of its many minorities, as Russian opponents of peace in Chechnya have frequently alleged? Not at all: there is virtually no other part of Russia where a single non-Russian nationality constitutes an overwhelming majority of the population on a clearly defined piece of territory.

So Russia is going to get the two things it needs most: political stability and peace. Its economy remains in shambles, but there are some signs of a recovery in production, and Anatoly Chubais, the mastermind of economic reform in the early Yeltsin period, is now back as the Kremlin chief of staff.

Even the troubled issue of NATO's expansion to include former Soviet satrapies in Eastern Europe, which is strongly opposed by Russian public opinion, is now being finessed. By the terms of an emerging tacit deal between Russia, Germany and the U.S., Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary will join NATO soon, but forego any nuclear weapons on their territory. The Baltic states and Ukraine will have to wait 10 to 15 years, however, and meanwhile Russia will be given an institutionalized role in NATO councils.

This is not a bad performance for a country that gave up its empire, lost its superpower status, and changed its whole political system and ideology only five years ago. In fact, it is miraculous.

George Kennan, whose famous post-war essay on the Soviet system outlined the strategy of "containment" that shaped Western policy for the next 40 years, recently wrote in his book At A Century's Ending: "We are at a hard and low moment in the historical development of the Russian people. They are just in the process of recovering from all the heart-rending reverses that this brutal century has brought to them. We should bear this in mind."

So we should. We should also be deeply impressed and grateful at how well they are dealing with this painful process of recovery.