The disintegration of Russia

National Review, Oct 12, 1998 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

It helps, meditating the awful crisis in Russia, to acknowledge that there isn't anything we can do about it. Yes, if there is a threat of terrible hunger we can contribute, but to look after the feeding of 150 million people spread out over 11 time zones is something that not even Iowa and Nebraska combined can take on: our contribution would be targeted. And therefore becomes surrealistic, since Russia will never be without the resources to feed itself unless it undertakes a state-driven starvation program like that of the elimination of the Kulaks in 1933. But to do that required the effective deployment of government power, and there is nothing of that kind today.

So what else? One American commentator suggested we might offer to buy their nuclear-arms reserves. An interesting idea. What kind of bucks would we be talking about? Well, the Russian government is threatening default on $133 billion, and private companies owe $70 billion. That adds up to 76 per cent of our annual defense expenditures. There are such other complications as that the physical removal of 22,000 nuclear weapons would take months, perhaps years. And what is left of Russian pride, which is a great deal, would not be likely to stand still for a stitch-by-stitch dismemberment of the tunic that brings to mind the great days of a sometime superpower.

When Mr. Clinton took his leave in Moscow a week or so back he spoke about U.S. willingness to "help" when the propitious moment came, but that offer was interpreted as a valedictory courtesy, the kind of thing one says, when one is a U.S. President, taking leave of a country after a heavy dose of local hospitality. What could Mr. Clinton do to free Russia from its galloping immobilization? Past economic help to Russia was given on condition that certain reforms should take place, which did not take place because post-1991 Russia never put its economic house in order. That is one cause of the crisis, another being the cultural indisposition to follow the Balcerowicz rule, a point adroitly made by Michael Weinstein of the New York Times a fortnight ago.

That rule (after Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland's finance minister) says: Anybody can engage in any kind of economic activity: go to it. That is the fast way to move from selling pencils on street corners to opening up Silicon Valleys. While Poland allowed its monster state enterprises to disassemble, Russia kept its own going, to the end of huge 10,000-worker factories laboring to produce at the cost of $1.50 a product the market would buy for only $1. The result could be easily predicted: increasing paralysis, measured by a ruble evaporating in value and by tens of millions of Russians who have not been paid their wages, some as many as five months back.

The immediate problem is to find coherent political expressions of alternative paths of action. The Communists are the largest party in the Duma but control only 30 per cent of the votes. And other than reviling capitalism, there is no program that clearly issues from the Party spokesmen. They do not appear to have an appetite to plead a return to pure or even impure Marxism, prepared only to go so far as to declaim, as in the Party's official program, that "the principal struggle between capitalism and socialism under whose mark the twentieth century progressed is not resolved." But of course capitalism never claimed to be up to the challenge of paying workers $1.50 for one dollar's work.

We cannot bail Yeltsin out economically. Can we do anything politically? No, not really. What would de Gaulle have done, as president of Russia? He'd have withdrawn, and awaited the summons of a regenerate Duma. Churchill? Adenauer? Yeltsin is a tiger when at bay, but his problems are complex. It is said, even, that when the time comes to dissolve the Duma and go for a fresh election, an effort will be made to impeach him. On two grounds, one of them his acquiescence in the dismemberment of the old Soviet Union. A second, his ceding to Chechnya de-facto autonomy.

Is there any prospect of such a thing? But who is to say what is constitutional propriety in a seven-year old republic in a country with zero prior experience in self-government? What does stand out is the piquancy, if that is the word for it, of a fall international season in which the President of the superpower is under the cloud of impeachment as also the president of the sometime other superpower, which is left in tatters, plus 22,000 nuclear weapons. Let us pray.