|
 |
 |
|
Putin’s Tatar Yoke
Between the barbeques at Crawford, Presidents Bush and Putin will be trying to compromise Washington’s determined pursuit of missile defense, not coincidentally filling Russia’s begging bowl — and collaborate against international terrorism.
It remains to be seen whether this will mark a new relationship. Until now Putin’s foreign policies have been helter-skelter. They were his frenzied attempt to reflate Russia’s position from a failed superpower to more than camp follower to the U.S. and the emerging E.U.
Putin comes to Crawford with some arrows in his quiver: a Russian economy, buoyed by world oil prices [but fragile with eminent worldwide recession]; no formidable domestic opponents; a society which appears, however painfully, adapting to market economics and an acceptable [to Russians if not to the West] authoritarianism after a decade’s chaos; eroding nuclear weapons he [and everyone else] would like to shuck.
Putin will try to talk, if not as an equal, as a world player because the fallout from 9/11 is seen in Moscow as an opportunity. The Russians are using everything from admonitions from bitter experience in their Afghanistan war, their remaining influence in their former Central Asia’s Moslem dependencies, and the KGB’s own past expertise in state terrorism to get wiggle room at international fora where this war’s outcome will be decided.
As the Communists used to say, it is not an accident Putin has tried to wrap his own dirty little war in Chechnya into what Washington likes to call “terrorism with a worldwide reach”. The Russian press reports Putin is dissatisfied with his military command still facing Chechen guerrillas and terrorist attacks in neighboring areas, some recalling it took Tsarist forces 50 years to subdue them. As Putin left for the U.S., his envoy and Chechen President Maskhadov's representative were to try again, despite Moscow’s denials, to find a political solution to this second Chechen war in a decade.
Putin is apparently correct when he charges Osama Bin Laden’s tentacles stretch into Chechnya; graduates of his Afghanistan training camps are said to be with the guerrillas and there are Chechens reportedly among Bin Laden’s “Afghan Arabs”. Putin does have old Soviet security forces along the Afghanistan-Tajikistan border. And Putin, along with India, had been helping prop up The Northern Alliance — for the moment, the main ground force against the Taleban. And the old Soviet bases in the four northern Afghanistan neighbors can be extremely useful.
But Putin is not happy seeing Washington establish a presence in these former Soviet colonies. It’s no secret the U.S. has seen their oil and gas [free of Russian control] as a strategic counter to the U.S.’ growing and precarious dependence on the Persian Gulf. And to the extent Putin is seen to collaborate with Bush, he undercuts his earlier strategem of creating “an anti-hegemonic front” against Washington, collecting everyone from Communist China to Iran/Iraq.
But those are today’s considerations. Hanging over Putin’s tactics will be a
greater strategic threat: Russia’s unresolved relationship with its own 20-million Moslems and its largely Islamic neighbors. “Chechnya” represents that problem. It is not going away. Radical Wahhabi Islam is spreading among Russia's Muslims, in part because some of Moscow’s million Muslims underwent religious training in Arab countries after the Soviets’ fall. Ethnic tensions are growing; 300 rowdies Oct. 31 staged a pogrom in a Moscow market resulting in two non-Slavs deaths. This past week Moscow’s ethnic intrigues and spillover from Chechnya threatened destabilization of former Soviet foreign minister President Shevrenadze’s Georgian regime — pleasurable “pay-back”, maybe, but creating more long-term problems for the Russians.
Putin recently abolished the Ministry for Federation Affairs, Nationalities, and Migration Policies, last vestige of the old Soviet “nationalities policy”. But Stalin’s “Potemkin” republics camouflaging iron Communist control with ethnic falderal has taken on a life of its own. Tatarstan Moslems — its capital, Kazan, the birthplace of Lenin — with a special “sovereignty” treaty with the Russian Federation, are restive, adopting the Latin alphabet [over Russian Cyrillic], refusing to endorse the U.S. campaign, calls for independence, etc.
Compounding these political tendencies is an unprecedented Russian population decline — predictions the current 144.2 million will fall to between 120-80 million Russians by 2050 — with a widening gap between much higher fertility rates for Moslems than Slavs.
Russian historians call the 250 years (1237-1480) of subjugation by nomads from the East “the Tatar Yoke", a chauvinistic exaggeration arguing that it destroyed the pre-invasion Orthodox Christian civilization and set imperial Russia on its long history of unresolved contradictions. The concept haunts Russian history and literature. A new Tatar yoke haunts Putin today.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.