But as with so much else that Ras is doing these days, there is more style – however boorish – than substance.

And the Kremlin’s style at the moment is to create as many difficulties as possible for The Bush Administration and its allies in the European Union without actually tipping the barrel. The petroleum barrel, that is. For it is from oil exports that Moscow’s prosperity and fat currency reserves derive as worldwide prices reach new unprecedented high levels. They provide a semblance of economic development and prosperity for Russia’s elite in Moscow and St. Petersburg as the world’s number two exporter of fossil fuels while no major reforms of the Soviet debacle left more than a decade ago are undertaken.

Ras apparently thinks he can use this verbiage as leverage – along with a continuing tightening of the screws on domestic opposition including any dissident media – to reestablish the power and glory of the former Soviet Union. He has said, after all, that the implosion of the Soviets was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. Even in this era of bizarre comments by so-called world leaders, that is something of a shocker, especially by the man who claims he is the world’s leading democrat.

But like so much else Putin is trying to manipulate these days, the SCO, itself, is a bundle of contradictions. It started as The Shanghai Five grouping in April 26, 1996 with the signing of “The Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions” by the heads of states of Kazakhstan, the People's Republic of China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan, meeting, largely, under Chinese sponsorship in Shanghai. [They have since been joined by Uzbekistan.]

What that really meant was collaboration among secret services, all modeled on the NKVD./KGB/STB, for action on a common concern: the growth of radical Islamic organizations in Central Asia. Their worry, in no small part, sprang from proselytization out of the jihadist sanctuary which the Taliban regime in Afghanistan afforded all the various Islamofascists. It was a mutually shared threat: to the Chinese in their strategic westernmost Singkiang province where Beijing faces a continuing revolt [albeit largely secular] from the indigenous Uighur population and more traditional Islamicists for the others. Beijing’s main weapon against the off and on insurgency is to try to swamp the local Turkic peoples with Chinese Han emigrants [much as it is attempting in neighboring Tibet against the Dala Lama’s followers].

This concern in another form was shared by former Soviet Central Asian states ruled, after a fashion, by former Soviet Communist apparatchiks or their offspring. Their countries, fictional national lines drawn on Josef Stalin’s 1930s maps, have secular ethnic claims to legitimacy rather than claims to pre-Soviet Moslem or pan-Turkic or Persian Imperial antecedents. The explosions of Islamic radicalism have often been, alas!, by would be reformers smarting under oldstyle Soviet regimes in new clothing and who little or no other method to organize and express opposition.

Then came 9/11, the American leap-frog over broken Soviet hurdles, into Central Asia in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts in Afghanistan. It has become conventional wisdom, somehow, to believe that Moscow collaborated in the U.S. effort to get emergency basing rights with the Central Asian states for the initial Afghan campaign. In fact, Putin instinctively tried to block early Washington efforts, but the determination of the American strike at militant Islam and the lure of dollar aid was too much for Moscow to overcome among the Central Asian regimes. Ever since, Moscow has been trying to fudge its way back into the region as the hegemonic power, with some success, although the Uzbek, Kazahk, Tajik, Azeri, and Kyrgyz politicians have hedged their bets in an effort to play all sides. American efforts, for example, to find a route around the Russians to world markets for nascent Caspian Basin oil development has had at least limited success. But the contest still goes on for moving the region’s potentially huge gas deposits.

Washington’s destruction of the Taliban regime did not wipe out the Jihadist threat for the miserably misgoverned Central Asians. Nor despite epic efforts by Beijing to wean away collaborationist Uighurs, did Beijing’s problem completely subside in Singkiang. Furthermore, with China’s growing dependence on imported fuel from the Mideast, Central Asia and Russian Siberia, Singkiang has become all the more strategic for the Chinese Communists now devoid of any legitimacy except their efforts at economic development.

And Beijing has tried not only to get a hold on the new Caspian resources but also to use yuan diplomacy to win hearts and minds in the old Soviet satrapies. So Beijing is pushing the SCO as one of its most important diplomatic initiatives at the same time Moscow tags along announcing its adherence to whatever the aims of the organization are from day to day. The only common bond is anti-Americanism. Indeed, the United States’ 2005 application to join the SCO was rejected. Asia’s stumbling gaggle, too, has latched on to the only regional organization that excludes the U.S. and the Europeans and has a regional claim to authenticity. Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan, all of whom have had “observer status”, are lining up to become full members.

With Russian and Chinese as its working languages, the SCO has been touted in some anti-American Asian circles as a counter to U.S. influence in resource-rich Central Asia and as Moscow’s antidote to the expansion of the North American Treaty Organization [NATO] into former Warsaw Pact Central and East European countries, Poland, Romania and the Baltic States. Hardly.

Russian Security Council Secretary and former Defense Minister Igor Ivanov, a likely candidate for the Russian presidency if Putin next year goes through with his plan to meet Russia’s constitutional ban on a third term, has said, "The issue of transforming the organization into a military alliance has not been brought up."

Still, some 6,500 troops will take part in large-scale counterterrorism exercises August 9-17 in Moscow’s Volga-Urals military district, with announced 500 combat vehicles from Russia and China, about 2,000 Russian and 1,600 Chinese personnel, two paratrooper companies [around 100 men each] from Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, and a platoon from Kyrgyzstan.

"The exercise will involve practically all SCO members for the first time in its history," Colonel-General Vladimir Moltenskoi said, adding that Uzbekistan would be represented by a group of staff officers. Moscow last year formally withdrew its border guard from Uzbekistan, supposedly protecting it from infiltration across the Oxus River from Afghanistan. It hadn’t much of an option with more than 80 percent of its personnel Uzbek with ethnic Slav officers. There as elsewhere, Russian conventional forces are under intolerable pressure from a still largely Soviet-style army with little of the reform promised again and again and with virtually no non-commissioned officer corps.

Ivanov said SCO military exercises were to be conducted to practice cooperation in antiterrorism operations. The demonstration, however, may leave astute observers skeptical. Moscow’s counterinsurgency efforts in Chechnya have still not subdued that insurgency and the spreading terrorist incidents in neighboring Moslem-majority areas of the Russian Federation don’t speak much for Russian strategy or tactics. So we are back, again, to the origins of the SCO itself.

Ras can be expected to beat his chest and proclaim the continuing Russian benign interest in stability in the Central Asian region. But his Chinese partners at the SCO may be more than a little skeptical behind their diplomatic smiles.

Beijing still doesn’t know if Putin can deliver the oil which he has promised both Beijing and Tokyo from unproved reserves in Western Siberia. Nor is it clear that while he has had great success in renationalizing fossil fuels, the Soviet shadow companies he has resurrected will be able to produce much less explore for new fields – including those he is now making claim to under the Arctic Pole. Funds that should have gone into rescuing decrepit pipeline infrastructure [there was an explosion and a cutoff to Finland last month in Leningrad] have been used to buy and take over Central and Western European distribution companies. Meanwhile, production stagnates and new fields are not developed and Moscow probably promises far more than it can deliver. In the new mammoth but difficult fields off Sakahlin in East Asia, Putin has either blackmailed foreign investors into contemplating their departure, or he has pushed them out altogether, again jeopardizing the technology the Russians must import.

Whether the once overcapitalized Soviet military industrial complex can continue to deliver war machines to the Chinese and the Indians – a renovated aircraft carrier for India has just been hit, again, with another three-year postponement and there are rumors the Chinese have returned defective fighter plane engines – is increasingly in doubt. That did not stop the Russians from only recently promising state of the art fighter-bombers to the ayatollahs in Tehran in defiance of U.S. and West European attempts to curb the Iranians’ nuclear weapons program. There have been reports that some of the former Soviet transport aircraft, however gas-guzzling and noisy, once in the Russians’ inventory cannot now be manufactured because of growing problems in the industry. Contradictorily, Moscow has announced new missiles development and testing and continues to try to mount space programs.

No wonder his siliviki admirers are worried that he, like his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, may find he cannot run the country from the backseat if he leaves office. That may explain why they have thrust out violently in all directions, including becoming suspects as radioactive murderers of émigrés.

One can only hope that efforts to modernize the Soviet Union’s old inventory of nuclear weapons – to which the U.S. has magnanimously contributed in its own interest – will not be jeopardized by the incendiary rhetoric of many in the Kremlin’s officialdom. For with his conventional forces in a shambles, if Putin ever wanted to put his force where his mouth is, he would probably have to rely on nuclear weapons.

Thus Vladimir [Ras] Putin’s theater of the absurd, in the great Russian tradition, is likely to continue unabated.

[*] For my younger readers: razzmatazz, razzamatazz a. A type of rag-time or early jazz music; old-fashioned ‘straight’ jazz; sentimental, ‘corny’ jazz; hence anything old-fashioned; stuff, rubbish. b. Noisy, showy publicity; meretricious or extravagant display; an event surrounded by such publicity or display; fuss, commotion, garishness.