The West forgives President Yeltsin's flaws

By Jonathan Steele

LONDON: Boris and Bill shared their traditional bear-hug on Thursday, but did not pose for a ceremonial photograph because the red carpet meant for the two presidents was tugged away by a powerful wind. It was a fitting reflection of their ambiguous seven-year relationship, lots of back-slapping interrupted by the occasional problem.

Clinton himself set the tone for the Istanbul summit of the leaders from the nations within the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) on Thursday by making one of the softest speeches of the conference.

He described his criticisms of the Russian military campaign in Chechnya as one of "disrespectful disagreement". In case even this was too much, he piled on the flattery by saying how thrilling Yeltsin's resistance to the hardline coup of 1991 in Moscow had been.

Clinton was right, in one sense, to refer to Yeltsin's defense of the Russian White House in 1991 as a key moment. By resoundingly defeating the hardline coup, Yeltsin guaranteed that Western governments would switch their support away from the enfeebled Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. From then on, Yeltsin was the man they would back.

The collapse of the Moscow coup gave Yeltsin the opportunity and rationale to have the Communist party banned. When he moved on to declare the Soviet Union dead so that all power switched to him as president of Russia, the west endorsed him as the man to end the Soviet economic system and to introduce market reforms. His emphasis on privatization and down-sizing government borrowed heavily from Reaganomics.

In those heady days of the West's honeymoon with Yeltsin, it seemed that nothing was too ambitious. Together, they would supervise the transition from cold war aggression to harmony and alliance, the dismantling of Russia's nuclear arsenal, and the introduction of capitalism throughout the former Soviet bloc.

So how did we get to this?

With the collapse of the USSR, Washington had three main goals, though each had to be handled with some finesse.

The first was to weaken Russia strategically to prevent any chance of a revival of the Soviet Union, but without provoking resistance and turning the country into an enemy again.

At the beginning, the task was easy since Yeltsin's first foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, was pro-Western.

But the United States' decision to expand North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) eastwards created the first major problem. A backlash developed, Yeltsin blustered, and the foreign minister was replaced by the more experienced Yevgeny Primakov.

However, Russia was too weak to do much more than bluster and, in a deft piece of diplomacy, the Clinton administration managed to contain Moscow's anger by offering it a strategic partnership with NATO. It also promised not to deploy bases or nuclear weapons in Poland, Hungary and the Csesh Republic, the new NATO members.

Backed by MPs of all parties, including those who were strongly committed to market reforms, Moscow took out its frustration by reviving close links to China, Iran, and Iraq. It began to criticize American unilateralism and the "uni-polar order".

The second U.S. goal was to de-fang the Russian nuclear arsenal, but without alienating the Russian military. This, too, was a complex task, especially in light of NATO's expansion.

By the beginning of this year, it had been achieved by a complex package of cash, flattery and training for the Russian officer corps, plus some nuclear arms reductions on the American side.

Now it has been put under severe threat again by NATO's air strikes on Yugoslavia and the successful campaign to liberate Kosovo.

Russians chose to downplay Serb atrocities and instead see NATO's action as an effort to expand the alliance's purview into southern Europe, and later to the rest of the world, regardless of international law. There was little they could do as a counter-measure, except to exert a bit of symbolic muscle by sending paratroopers to occupy Pristina airport, and rattle their nuclear sabres again.

If the West was going to showcase the power of its conventional forces, Russia would have to rely increasingly on its nuclear weapons.

In that vein, the imminent American decision to break out of the anti-ballistic missile treaty to build a son-of-Star Wars defense system, has prompted the Russians to upgrade their nuclear weapons.

The final U.S. goal is to build capitalism in Russia, but without allowing Russia to become a major competitor. The caveat looked minor, since the Russian economy was so starved of investment and investment potential that it would be years before it could export anything except raw materials. It would be correct to ask in the midst of all these militaristic and political maneuvers, where does democracy rank in terms of priorities?

The answer would be, "not very high".

The major flaw in the whole Western approach to Russia has been to get too close to Yeltsin. It has put all its money in the Yeltsin basket, preferring to invest short-term in a personality rather than, long-term, in a process. Since Yeltsin is an authoritarian, this has involved numerous embarrassments such as Western support for him when he closed down Parliament illegally in 1993, or manipulated television coverage and broke the campaign spending rules in the 1996 election.

The counter-argument has always been "If not Yeltsin, then who?". Western governments also say that, for all his flaws, Yeltsin accepts a multi-party system, he has not locked up his critics or opponents, and he tolerates a free press -- none of which the Soviet leadership did.

But the excuse looks increasingly thin, especially when Yeltsin embarks on a punitive war in Chechnya that has already caused hundreds of civilian deaths and left hundreds of thousands homeless.

And it is the second time he has done it.

-- Guardian News Service