19/08/08 "Asia
Times" --
On the night of November 22, 2004, then-Russian president - now
premier - Vladimir Putin watched the television news in his
dacha near Moscow. People who were with Putin that night report
his anger and disbelief at the unfolding "Orange" revolution in
Ukraine. "They lied to me," Putin said bitterly of the United
States. "I'll never trust them again." The Russians still can't
fathom why the West threw over a potential strategic alliance
for Ukraine. They underestimate the stupidity of the West.
American hardliners are the first to say that they feel stupid
next to Putin. Victor Davis Hanson wrote on August 12 [1] of
Moscow's "sheer diabolic brilliance" in Georgia, while Colonel
Ralph Peters, a columnist and television commentator, marveled
on August 14 [2], "The Russians are alcohol-sodden barbarians,
but now and
then they vomit up a genius ... the empire of the czars hasn't
produced such a frightening genius since [Joseph] Stalin." The
superlatives recall an old observation about why the plots of
American comic books need clever super-villains and stupid
super-heroes to even the playing field. Evidently the same thing
applies to superpowers.
The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid
ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency
promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this
asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as
stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to
destroy them. That is what the informed Russian public believes,
judging from last week's postings on web forums, including this
writer's own.
These perceptions are dangerous because they do not stem from
propaganda, but from a difference in existential vantage point.
Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic
decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by
mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is
people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded
outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union,
nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the
Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures
the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and
cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.
The Russians know (as every newspaper reader does) that
Georgia's President Mikheil Saakashvili is not a model democrat,
but a nasty piece of work who deployed riot police against
protesters and shut down opposition media when it suited him -
in short, a politician in Putin's mold. America's interest in
Georgia, the Russians believe, has nothing more to do with
promoting democracy than its support for the gangsters to whom
it handed the Serbian province of Kosovo in February.
Again, the Russians misjudge American stupidity. Former
president Ronald Reagan used to say that if there was a pile of
manure, it must mean there was a pony around somewhere. His
epigones have trouble distinguishing the pony from the manure
pile. The ideological reflex for promoting democracy dominates
the George W Bush administration to the point that some of its
senior people hold their noses and pretend that Kosovo, Ukraine
and Georgia are the genuine article.
Think of it this way: Russia is playing chess, while the
Americans are playing Monopoly. What Americans understand by
"war games" is exactly what occurs on the board of the Parker
Brothers' pastime. The board game Monopoly is won by placing as
many hotels as possible on squares of the playing board.
Substitute military bases, and you have the sum of American
strategic thinking.
America's idea of winning a strategic game is to accumulate the
most chips on the board: bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, a
pipeline in Georgia, a "moderate Muslim" government with a big
North Atlantic Treaty Organization base in Kosovo, missile
installations in Poland and the Czech Republic, and so forth.
But this is not a strategy; it is only a game score.
Chess players think in terms of interaction of pieces:
everything on the periphery combines to control the center of
the board and prepare an eventual attack against the opponent's
king. The Russians simply cannot absorb the fact that America
has no strategic intentions: it simply adds up the value of the
individual pieces on the board. It is as stupid as that. But
there is another difference: the Americans are playing chess for
career and perceived advantage. Russia is playing for its life,
like Ingmar Bergman's crusader in The Seventh Seal.
Dull people know that clever people are cleverer than they are,
but they do not know why. The nekulturny (uncultured)
Colonel Ralph Peters, a former US military intelligence analyst,
is impressed by the tactical success of Russian arms in Georgia,
but cannot fathom the end-game to which these tactics
contribute. He writes, "The new reality is that a nuclear,
cash-rich and energy-blessed Russia doesn't really worry too
much whether its long-term future is bleak, given problems with
Muslim minorities, poor life-expectancy rates, and a declining
population. Instead, in the here and now, it has a window of
opportunity to reclaim prestige and weaken its adversaries."
Precisely the opposite is true: like a good chess player, Putin
has the end-game in mind as he fights for control of the board
in the early stages of the game. Demographics stand at the
center of Putin's calculation, and Russians are the principal
interest that the Russian Federation has in its so-called near
abroad. The desire of a few hundred thousand Abkhazians and
South Ossetians to remain in the Russian Federation rather than
Georgia may seem trivial, but Moscow is setting a precedent that
will apply to tens of millions of prospective citizens of the
Federation - most controversially in Ukraine.
Before turning to the demographics of the near abroad, a few
observations about Russia's demographic predicament are
pertinent. The United Nations publishes population projections
for Russia up to 2050, and I have extended these to 2100. If the
UN demographers are correct, Russia's adult population will fall
from about 90 million today to only 20 million by the end of the
century.
Russia is the only country where abortions are more numerous
than live births, a devastating gauge of national despair.
Under Putin, the Russian government introduced an ambitious
natalist program to encourage Russian women to have children. As
he warned in his 2006 state of the union address, "You know that
our country's population is declining by an average of almost
700,000 people a year. We have raised this issue on many
occasions but have for the most part done very little to address
it ... First, we need to lower the death rate. Second, we need
an effective migration policy. And third, we need to increase
the birth rate."
Russia's birth rate has risen slightly during the past several
years, perhaps in response to Putin's natalism, but demographers
observe that the number of Russian women of childbearing age is
about to fall off a cliff. No matter how much the birth rate
improves, the sharp fall in the number of prospective mothers
will depress the number of births. UN forecasts show the number
of
Russians aged 20-29 falling from 25 million today to only 10
million by 2040.
Russia, in other words, has passed the point of no return in
terms of fertility. Although roughly four-fifths of the
population of the Russian Federation is considered ethnic
Russians, fertility is much higher among the Muslim minorities
in Central Asia. Some demographers predict a Muslim majority in
Russia by 2040, and by mid-century at the latest.
Part of Russia's response is to encourage migration of Russians
left outside the borders of the federation after the collapse of
communism in 1991. An estimated 6.5 million Russians from the
former Soviet Union now work in Russia as undocumented aliens,
and a new law will regularize their status. Only 20,000 Russian
"compatriots" living abroad, however, have applied for
immigration to the federation under a new law designed to draw
Russians back.
That leaves the 9.5 million citizens of Belarus, a relic of the
Soviet era that persists in a semi-formal union with the Russian
Federation, as well as the Russians of the Western Ukraine and
Kazakhstan. More than 15 million ethnic Russians reside in those
three countries, and they represent a critical strategic
resource. Paul Goble in his Window on Eurasia website reported
on August 16:
Moscow retreated after
encountering fierce opposition from other countries, but
semi-legal practices of obtaining Russian citizenship that
began in former Soviet republics in the early 1990s continue
unabated. There is plenty of evidence that there are one to
two million people living in the territory of the former
Soviet Union who have de facto dual citizenship and are
reluctant to report it to the authorities. Russia did little
to stop the process. Moreover, starting in 1997, it
encouraged de facto dual citizenship.
Russia has an existential interest
in absorbing Belarus and the Western Ukraine. No one cares about
Byelorus. It has never had an independent national existence or
a national culture; the first
grammar in the Belorussian
language was not printed until 1918, and little over a third of
the population of Belarus speaks the language at home. Never has
a territory with 10 million people had a sillier case for
independence. Given that summary, it seems natural to ask why
anyone should care about Ukraine. That question is
controversial; for the moment, I will offer the assertion that
partition is the destiny of Ukraine.
Even with migration and annexation of former Russian territory
that was lost in the fracture of the USSR, however, Russia will
not win its end-game against demographic decline and the
relative growth of Muslim populations. The key to Russian
survival is Russification, that is, the imposition of Russian
culture and
Russian law on ethnicities at the periphery of the federation.
That might sound harsh, but that has been Russian nature from
its origins.
Russia is not an ethnicity but an empire, the outcome of
hundreds of years of Russification. That Russification has been
brutal is an understatement, but it is what created Russia out
of the ethnic morass around the Volga river basin. One of the
best accounts of Russia's character comes from Eugene
Rosenstock-Huessey (Franz Rosenzweig's cousin and sometime
collaborator) in his 1938 book Out of Revolution.
Russia's territory tripled between the 16th and 18th centuries,
he observes, and the agency of its expansion was a unique
Russian type. The Russian peasant, Rosenstock-Huessey observed,
"was no stable freeholder of the Western type but much more a
nomad, a pedlar, a craftsman and a soldier. His capacity for
expansion was tremendous."
In 1581 Asiatic Russia was
opened. Russian expansion, extending even in the eighteenth
century as far as the Russian River in Northern California,
was by no means Czaristic only. The "Moujik", the Russian
peasant, because he is not a "Bauer" or a "farmer", or a
"laborer", but a "Moujik", wanders and stays, ready to
migrate again eventually year after year.
Russia was never a multi-ethnic
state, but rather what I call a supra-ethnic state, that is, a
state whose national principle transcends ethnicity. A reader
has called my attention to an account of the most Russian of all
writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, of his own
Russo-Lithuanian-Ukrainian background:
I suppose that one of my
Lithuanian ancestors, having emigrated to the Ukraine,
changed his religion in order to marry an Orthodox
Ukrainian, and became a priest. When his wife died he
probably entered a monastery, and later, rose to be an
archbishop. This would explain how the Archbishop Stepan may
have founded our Orthodox family, in spite of his being a
monk. It is somewhat surprising to see the Dostoyevsky, who
had been warriors in Lithuania, become priests in Ukraine.
But this is quite in accordance with Lithuanian custom. I
may quote the learned Lithuanian W St Vidunas in this
connection: "Formerly many well-to-do Lithuanians had but
one desire: to see one or more of their sons enter upon an
ecclesiastical career."
Dostoyevsky's mixed background was
typically Russian, as was the Georgian origin of Joseph Stalin.
Russia intervened in Georgia to uphold the principle that anyone
who holds a Russian passport - Ossetian, Akhbaz, Belorussian or
Ukrainian - is a Russian. Russia's survival depends not so much
on its birth rate, nor on immigration, nor even on prospective
annexation, but on the survival of the principle by which Russia
was built in the first place. That is why Putin could not
abandon the pockets of Russian passport holders in the Caucusus.
That Russia history has been tragic, and its nation-building
principle brutal and sometimes inhuman, is a different matter.
Russia is sufficiently important that its tragedy will be our
tragedy, unless averted.
The place to avert tragedy is in Ukraine. Russia will not permit
Ukraine to drift to the West. Whether a country that never had
an independent national existence prior to the collapse of
communism should become the poster-child for national
self-determination is a different question. The West has two
choices: draw a line in the sand around Ukraine, or trade it to
the Russians for something more important.
My proposal is simple: Russia's help in containing nuclear
proliferation and terrorism in the Middle East is of infinitely
greater import to the West than the dubious self-determination
of Ukraine. The West should do its best to pretend that the
"Orange" revolution of 2004 and 2005 never happened, and secure
Russia's assistance in the Iranian nuclear issue as well as
energy security in return for an understanding of Russia's
existential requirements in the near abroad. Anyone who thinks
this sounds cynical should spend a week in Kiev.
Russia has more to fear from a nuclear-armed Iran than the
United States, for an aggressive Muslim state on its borders
could ruin its attempt to Russify Central Asia. Russia's
strategic interests do not conflict with those of the United
States, China or India in this matter. There is a certain degree
of rivalry over energy resources, but commercial rivalry does
not have to turn into strategic enmity.
If Washington chooses to demonize Russia, the likelihood is that
Russia will become a spoiler with respect to American strategic
interests in general, and use the Iranian problem to twist
America's tail. That is a serious risk indeed, for nuclear
proliferation is the one means by which outlaw regimes can pose
a serious threat to great powers. Russia confronts questions not
of expediency, but of existence, and it will do whatever it can
to gain maneuvering room should the West seek to "punish" it for
its actions in Georgia.
One irony of the present crisis is that Washington's
neo-conservatives, by demanding a tough stance against Russia,
may have harmed Israel's security interests more profoundly than
any of Israel's detractors in American politics. The
neo-conservatives are not as a rule Jewish, but many of them are
Jews who have a deep concern for Israel's security - as does
this writer. If America turns Russia into a strategic adversary,
the probability of Israel's survival will drop by a big notch.
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Russia is the only country where abortions are more numerous
than live births, a devastating gauge of national despair. 
Russians aged 20-29 falling from 25 million today to only 10
million by 2040. 
