Russia's Fall

The Guardian, 22 September 2000.

What has the fate of the Russian submariners to do with the Siberian tiger? Mr Putin's powerlessness in the face of the trapped submariners is a symptom of a much more widespread weakness. Russia's crumbling state could do nothing to save the Kursk, and not much to prevent still worse catastrophes from happening in the future.

It is not only the country's nuclear facilities that are rusting away - at fearful risk to Russia and the world, as Gwyn Prins wrote last week. An enfeebled state cannot stop the plundering of Russia's natural resources. Illegal logging is destroying its forests. Deeply scarred by 70 years of Soviet central planning, Russia's environment is now at grave risk from the decay of the Russian state.

Mr Putin's efforts to strengthen the authority of government have been lauded in the west. Yet his policies do not bode well for the protection of nature in Russia. He is credited with seeking to rein in the mafias that are thriving in the wake of the country's failed transition to a western-style market economy. But he has chosen to abolish two of its principal environmental agencies - the State Committee for Environmental Protection and the Federal Forestry Service - that have curbed poaching in the past. As a result, the wild Siberian tiger - already reduced to a few hundred in numbers - faces extinction in the near future.

At the same time, 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.

The entombed submariners and the vanishing Siberian tiger may seem worlds apart, but they are casualties in the same ongoing catastrophe. It would be pleasant to think that the loss of the Kursk might stir some new thinking on western policy towards Russia. The dismal record of the past decade suggests we should not be holding our breath.