Russian roulette: Moscow is developing a new rallying cry. Rogue states of the world, unite

National Review, Jan 26, 1998 by Chandler Rosenberger

Mr. Rosenberger is assistant to the president of Boston University and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy.

SIX years ago, Yevgeny Primakov, then a special envoy of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, made his first foray onto the international stage. He arrived in Baghdad on the eve of the first Western attack in the Gulf War, hoping to avert hostilities at the last minute -- and thus unravel President Bush's careful diplomacy. Primakov worked so hard at this that -- like CNN's Bernard Shaw --he was in the Iraqi capital when the bombs began to fall and had to be hustled out of the country, peace proposals in hand.

That was then; this is now. When in October Saddam Hussein expelled the American members of a UN arms-inspection team, precipitating yet another Iraqi crisis, it was Primakov, not anyone in the West, who controlled the end-game. As Washington fumed on the sidelines, Primakov, now Russia's foreign minister, cut a deal that allowed Saddam to appear to cave in (he let American inspectors back into the country, but cut off their access to dozens of possible weapons sites). In exchange, Saddam won a crucial promise from Primakov: that Russia would work to ease sanctions against Iraq in the United Nations Security Council.

The 67-year-old Primakov is a survivor, a Soviet apparatchik who has prospered in the Yeltsin era and whose own vision of a "new world order" may be more viable nowadays than that of his old Gulf War adversary, George Bush. The foreign minister stands as an emblem, not just of the nasty pedigree of the upper echelons of the new Russian bureaucracy, but also of a broader anti-American trend in Russian attitudes and foreign policy. His vision of "multipolarity" aims to set Russia on a collision course with the West -- making the kind of mischief Primakov worked in Iraq a permanent feature of Russia's behavior in the world.

Many Russian intellectuals are in the mood for just such an anti-Western turn. Roy Medvedev -- a respected intellectual and dissident in Soviet days -- has decried calls for a fascist, nationalist regime in Russia. But even he argues that "no less dangerous are the attempts to turn Russia into a commonplace country of the Western type, thrusting upon it Western values and American-model capitalism, which are alien to our people." The key to national restoration, Medvedev contends, lies in a new assertiveness on the world stage. "Neither 'humility' nor the position of a client of the West will help change the situation. We must stop the country's decline, including by means of foreign policy."

Primakov has taken up Medvedev's challenge, with relish. For him, the fall of the Soviet Empire was a potential personal disaster --which he appears to have turned into triumph. There have always been rumors in Moscow that Primakov has kept secret a Jewish background so as to avoid impeding his official career -- thus symbolically rejecting his real family for the embrace of Mother Russia. Whether the rumor is true or not, there is no doubt that Primakov has shrewdly managed to keep his career thriving in all political circumstances.

AS a reporter for Pravda in the Middle East in the early 1960s, Primakov was able to weave an impressive web of reporting contacts and political affiliations. He cultivated the big names of the Middle East, including Mustafa Barzani, then the leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan; Hosni Mubarak, the future president of Egypt; Jordan's King Hussein; and a young Iraqi Ba'athist leader named Saddam Hussein. Primakov's work abroad during this period --the latter years of Khrushchev's reign -- suggests he had connections at the highest levels of the Soviet apparatus.

Upon returning to Moscow, Primakov took up a number of positions within the USSR's Academy of Sciences and supervised "brainstorming" sessions on problems of Soviet foreign policy. Transcripts of these seminars were compressed into policy papers for emerging Party leaders such as Gorbachev and Yuri Andropov. Primakov also managed to find time to supervise the doctoral thesis of Saddam Hussein's cousin.

Primakov's politicking at home earned him a first-class cabin on a sinking ship -- the Communist Party. By 1989, he had risen through the Party's Central Committee to become head of one chamber of the Supreme Soviet. As Primakov watched the Soviet Union come apart, he hedged his bets. He made contacts with liberal reformers -- but he also did the Party's bidding, no matter how brutal the task.

As the informal supervisor of troubled Azerbaijan in 1990, when that republic was seeking a measure of autonomy, Primakov at first negotiated with the rebellious Popular Front, but, as the threat of general strikes loomed, he warned of reprisals. "The militia, troops of the MVD, the KGB, and the Procuracy -- these additional forces have arrived from Moscow," he told a crowd on the eve of a crackdown. "Everything is being done to restore order." In the subsequent attack, 130 Azeri protesters were killed, 700 wounded.