Summit can't hide Russia's realities

WASHINGTON -- A funny thing happened on the way from the end of the Cold War to today. Russia didn't become democratic, it didn't become modern and industrialized, and it still doesn't think it lost the ideological battle with the West.
"We don't consider that we were defeated in the Cold War," Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff to the Kremlin and its major ideologist, actually said recently. "We believe that we defeated our own totalitarian system.
& quot;It's clear to us that Moscow did far more to democratize Eastern Europe and Central Asia than Washington or London. Moscow democratized this huge space that is now regenerating itself."
When you look at upcoming events in President Vladimir Putin's own St. Petersburg between July 15 and 17, one can hardly blame his "security regime" for its cocksure rewriting of history.
The world's truly democratic seven countries -- nations on the level of the United States, France, Germany and Japan -- will accept the striking posturing of Putin's ironically named "managed democracy" as leading the G8 grouping of industrialized and democratic nations.
World leader?
If this were only your garden variety Kremlinesque curiosity, or an example of Russia's old Potemkin village style of existential being (those old false fronts behind which lurks only peasant silence), one could accept it as that. But the West -- through its own Potemkin dreams after the Cold War that Russia could be flattered into Westernization -- has helped to create a Russia that sees itself again as a world leader.
Lilia Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center, one of the best analysts of Putin and his nation, cautioned recently that Putin's "bureaucratic-authoritarian regime" not only presents its own interests as those of the Russian state, but that Russia is dangerously close to resembling a "nuclear petrostate" or an "energy superpower" that undercuts any prospect of its developing into the competitive, high-tech, market economy that the G8 states stand for.
But the transformation of the miserable, poor, humbled post-Cold War Russia to a country that will stand up, not only proudly, but surely arrogantly, in front of the developed world is nevertheless fragile. It is due to only one product, oil, and even the most careless observer should know how slippery that is. But for the moment, Prince Petrol rules, and not only in Mother Russia.
With oil at $70 a barrel and gas flowing as well, Russia is bringing in $500 million a day. It now has 33 billionaires. From a position of abject poverty as recently as 1998, when it almost financially collapsed, Russia now boasts oil-greased foreign reserves of $230 billion. Putin has braced this up with his own tightly controlled United Russia Party, which looks and acts suspiciously like the old Communist Party.
Amazingly, the government recently began lifting all currency controls on the ruble to make the once-worthless currency fully convertible. This announcement came two weeks before the G8 conference; and at the same time, Moscow reached agreement to pay off its remaining $22 billion in debt -- ahead of time.
'One-pipeline state'
One of the cleverest recent comments about the New Russia came from Ivan Krastev, a prominent Bulgarian strategic thinker. "The transition," he said, "has been from one-party state to a one-pipeline state."
Meanwhile, to show his compliant Western G8 compatriots that he means to stand tall (actually, he is shorter than soul mate George W.), President Putin has led up to the summit with tough stands against the West. In Sochi in May, for instance, he completely rejected E.U. appeals to be more amenable to pipelines carrying Russian energy to Europe; and his attitude toward fragile, newly independent states on Russia's peripheries, like Georgia and Ukraine, has only hardened.
Why should the West have let itself in for such a potentially humiliating summit, not to speak of longer-range trouble? Once again, the answer is found in cultural ignorance: Essentially, the Western nations seriously underestimated Russia's historically autocratic mind-set and its inability to absorb democratic and capitalist ideas. It really thought that by giving Russia prestige in the world, albeit unearned, it would win Russia over.
Still, the nation's supposed newfound power remains a strange and deceptive creature.
Universal Press Syndicate